The capture and study of microbes, either in liquid or air, remains an important field of study. Such methods permit a better understanding of the classes and phenotypes of microbes inhabiting a medium and further elucidation of mechanisms involved in their growth and proliferation. Unfortunately, a cost-effective method for cell capture and identification of specific types of microbes has remained elusive.
Cell surface carbohydrates, in particular, play an important role in a variety of processes related to cell growth and proliferation. In microbial systems, extracellular carbohydrates are critical in biofouling, host-microbe interactions, cell motility, and immune recognition processes. Due to the highly dynamic nature of extracellular glycan expression, an understanding of the role of exopolysaccharides (EPS) in many microbial systems is generally lacking. Currently, chromatography, mass spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are among the techniques employed to analyze extracellular glycans, but these typically require additional processing steps that are likely to change the extracellular glycan concentration. This, in turn, generally make these analytical methods inaccurate, slow, low throughput, and expensive. Thus, there would be a significant benefit in a method of capture that could also be used to further elucidate the compositional and/or functional characteristics of cell surface carbohydrates without the significant drawbacks involved in conventional methods of the art. Such knowledge could eventually prove useful for favorably promoting or inhibiting the growth of select microbes in a microbial population.